Higher Learning
by ZPublicizes
Summary: Early season one, Sam POV. A vignette. Sort of hurt/comfort. 'This is not the reason Sam left but it is piled on, this fracture-point, this faultline.'


Day is sluggishly draining into evening when Sam wakes, low roar of evening traffic coming in from the street-facing windows, crimson glow of sunset slinking through a crack in the blinds to creep up the curve of Dean's bare shoulder where he lays sprawled on his side among a mess of bloody sheets, another conspicuous problem for the laundromat.

An aching line of bruises treks their way across the terrain of Sam's lower back. Wincing through a stretch, he recognizes that falling asleep in the chair stuck in the corner with old upholstery beaten board-stiff was not the best notion to follow, whatever his ideas about oh so heroically guarding the door.

Quietly, he sets the gun he'd been cradling on the television stand, crossing the room to Dean's side. The wide bandages taped to his brother's thigh are spotted with blood. Knuckles grazing warm flesh, he smooths the edge of one side back into place.

Dean barely shifts in his sleep. On the nightstand sits a prescriptionist's nightmare: an open pill bottle and an empty flask of whiskey toppled over on its side. Sam has all the right and proper concerns about mixing the two but a fracture-point of will when it comes to Dean in pain and needful, so he doled them out one after the other as Dean cursed his way through the first row of stitches, too much blood already slicking both their hands.

Seating himself with outsized caution on the edge of the mattress, Sam presses the back of one hand close to the skin is hot and dry, firm to the touch. He makes a mental note: inspect the gashes for infection in a couple of hours. Only half a day since the skinwalker tried to take a chunk out of Dean's leg. Take a chunk out is a funny phrase, reminding him of ordering off a take-out menu, reminding him that he is going to do that too - from the hole-in-the-wall Korean place just down the strip across from this motel, just as soon as he's taken care of the blood stains, all this troublesome, incriminating evidence that just piles up and up like something mundane, dishes, homework, laundry. Unlike these things, it has to be made to disappear completely.

He remembers when he was a child, thinking for the first time that their lives were one long act of erasure.

Sam lets his fingers curl lightly above the bend of Dean's knee. The skin is a soft and thin and delicate thing that slots neatly into place in the equation he's working. Claws could've ripped open Dean's belly easily as they'd laid open the vicious gashes on his thigh. Lucky, Dean had called it. Slurred the word at him. Lucky, like it'd only been a choice of where, not if, like there hadn't been a choice at all.

This is not the reason Sam left but it is piled on, this fracture-point, this faultline.

The sliver of sunset sinks back to the floor, giving up their cramped motel room to the night. Habit spurs Sam up to check the locks, the salt lines. Thinking idly of that maxim some children are taught: there's nothing there in the dark that isn't there in the day. But that's not really true of anyone's life, is it? He goes to the sink installed like an afterthought, pipes groaning like they weren't made for this, and wets his hands, scrubs them over his face and back through his hair.

The mirror over the sink is old and pockmarked and tacky, something that once could've been a tropical paradise papered over the corner, and an inscription on the frame's arch: _take me to wonderland._

Sam's gaze slides to Dean's reflection, his face and body all smooth lassitude. The pain that had him gritting his teeth around a stubborn grin faded without trace. The pair of boxers he'd hauled on after Sam wrecked what was left of his jeans were black once, now faded and thin. Sam thinks they could stand to be replaced, looking at the hem of one leg long-since fallen out, the continually fraying edge, and he needs to think of a means to tell him that without Dean making a crack about perving on him in his sleep. But why should he let that get to him?

Oh, Sam thinks, realizing that he feels distinctly uncomfortable seeing Dean exposed like this, like it's a new thing to see him stripped of pretense in even this small way. It's not new. Unusual, maybe, even when wounded.

Life - this itinerant, outlaw, half-mythic life, in particular - taught Dean early that perception is everything. No-one would see their lives for what they were, too distracted, caught up, whisked away on Dean's quicksilver mouth. Look at this, check me out, pay no attention to the dirt and blood under the nails and the grimy pool-hall cash, the way the body moves, like it can never completely forget its function as a weapon.

Burning eyes, bright white smiles. Carefree, Sam used to think, with a sour-penny taste in his mouth - jealousy, that most common of brotherly sins, almost normal. Like nothing touches him. Careless, he knows now, a bone-deep disregard -  
for what?

Sam knocks the side of his fist against the sink and whirls like a compass needle, magnetized, returning to the bedside. Only stops when he's got his fingers digging into Dean's arm, skin white beneath the tips, bruisable, his breaths quick, shallow. Steady rise and fall of his chest, should be all the reassurance needed. Dean doesn't stir. The urge to shake him awake is insane.

Sam relaxes his grip, an unreal heat prickling uncomfortably at his skin, Being angry with Dean is about as much use as spitting curses at the Atlantic's brown tides, while they're spitting back angry white foam, sand and seaglass and stones. They'll both go on, doing what they do, regardless.

Dean's arm slides across the pillow, settling with his hand curled loosely near his face. His lips part on a deep breath.  
"You drive me crazy," he says in a neutral voice, half-hoping Dean will wake and he can just be angry with him despite the uselessness, and take comfort in the familiar feeling. This is the closest they come to boyhood nostalgia these days.

This is Sam only beginning to learn his sharp-edged hall-of-mirrors brother. With it comes the relearning of corollary things: what it is to resent, to fear, to envy, to love, to need, to doubt, to plead, to trust, to -  
ad infinitum


End file.
